Abstract:
ABSTRACT: The paper ponders upon semantic and syntactic differences between the
operators 'jak' (‘how’) and 'jak to' (‘how as’) introducing propositional complements after
narrative predicates such as 'opowiadać' (‘to tell, to recount’) against the clauses introduced by 'że' (‘that’). The analysis has led to formulating the following observations: a) a narrative predicate followed by jak is used to recount events from the extralinguistic reality, whereas a clause introduced by że reports how the knowledge of the speaker has changed on the basis of what someone else said; b) the operator 'jak to' does not form a unit of language together with the verb but it may be introduced after any speech act reporting verb, as such it should be considered as an operational unit (in the sense of the term proposed by A. Bogusławski (1988, 1994)) and it operates on a specific class of verbs; c) it is possible to formulate a general interpretation of predicates allowing propositional complementation introduced by jak (cf. widzieć ‘to see’, słyszeć ‘to hear’, lubić ‘to like’, przypominać sobie ‘to recall’).
